Limbaugh: Christie Gates distraction

Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday slammed the media for its coverage of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, saying the focus on the bridge controversy only serves to take former defense secretary Robert Gates’ critique of President Barack Obama “off the front page.”

The conservative radio host told his listeners that “the left right now is very excited” over Wednesday’s report tying the Republican governor’s staff to the closing of several lanes of traffic in Fort Lee, N.J. And with the attention turned to that scandal, the media can conveniently ignore Gates’ pointed assessment of the president’s handling of the war in Afghanistan, Limbaugh said.

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“The left right now is very excited over what we just learned about Governor Christie, because what we’ve just learned about Governor Christie is helping to take the Gates thing off the front page,” Limbaugh said, according to a transcript.

“The point is the media has just glommed onto that like bees in a honeycomb so that they don’t have to talk about the Gates book,” he added.

“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Christie senior staffer Bridget Kelly wrote to Port Authority official and Christie ally David Wildstein in an Aug. 13, 2013 email, according to The Record, suggesting the closures were retaliation against the local mayor for not supporting the governor’s reelection.

What should be the bigger story, Limbaugh told his listeners, is Gates’ critique of Obama. Gates wrote in his memoir, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” that by early 2010 he believed the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out,” according to a preview in The Washington Post. The former defense secretary also added that “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission.”

Limbaugh said Gates’ assessment didn’t surprise him, but noted “it is clear that Bob Gates knew a bunch of stuff that he held in reserve for a book long after the release of any information would have any impact on anything.”

“Can you imagine if the people of this country had been told that Obama’s opposition to Iraq was purely political?” he said.

Still, “we all knew this,” Limbaugh said, since “everything the liberal Democrats do is political,”

“This is my point and I think it’d be really helpful if a whole bunch more Americans knew that,” he said, according to a transcript. “You know, Obama and Hillary get away with supposedly having principled opposition to the war in Iraq, and there was nothing principled about it; it was all political.”

“Then we find out he’s not even committed to it,” Limbaugh added. “We find out that his involvement in Afghanistan is perfunctory at best. But, you know, the real problem with that is, there are real men and women that he’s sending into harm’s way in something he doesn’t believe in. Nobody, by the way, is saying what Gates said isn’t true. The left is going through pretzeled conniption fits trying to react to that.”